Web-Based Services and Future Business Models

1. Introduction

The emergence of the Internet as a platform has created new opportunities as well as challenges for firm’s management. A paradigm shift is taking place where Internet is being used as a “Web infrastructure to deal with the Internet data storage, scalability, and computation” (Kambil, 2009). This new paradigm shift provides a compelling value preposition for organizations and requires the adoption of new business models for the management of their core activities in a competitive way.

In particular, the new emerging business models are related with open innovation model, cloud computing approach, as well as social networking. Through these new emerging approaches and technologies firms are able to outsource some high cost activities as well as to create competitive networking links and ties that enable them to find the right set of capabilities and competences required for managing technology, innovation and product development in a cost efficient way.

These opportunities are considered to be highly relevant for the competitiveness of businesses as well, being that the new emerging technologies help them to address some of the barriers and impediments they encounter. In this paper we aim to demonstrate the changes that these new trends are witnessing for the business models of firms, how they are reconfiguring their activities in order to grasp the most of the opportunities offered by the emerging technologies.

We start by providing the main literature review related to the new emerging technologies and business models. Therefore, we focus on delineating the components of the business models of providers and users of the new technologies.